A brilliant journey into a bygone land: contemplating a bust of Christa Wolf, Clemens Meyer begins a wide-ranging conversation with the deceased writer about East German literature, how incredibly important reading was at that time, and the writers’ visions and dreams, which were supposed to become reality.
Doesn’t his first novel, Als wir träumten, take its very title from the work of Christa Wolf? Clemens Meyer owes so much in his life and writing to the literature of East Germany. What greats it had, what lives, what books! In an internal dialogue with Christa Wolf, Meyer relates the history of utopias in literature – and, in the process, presents an idiosyncratic, subjective, emphatic history of East German literature. How did he himself become who he is? And how, in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was an entire era of German literature expunged by critics and then all but forgotten by audiences and readers? A search for answers. And a fervent tribute to a great writer.
